The New Jim Crow Analysis

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Incarceration for drug-related crimes is rising at unprecedented rates in the United States as a result of the War on Drugs and the formation of the prison industrial complex. The upsurge in incarceration rates has disproportionally affected poor communities of color, specifically African Americans. This can be attributed to the prevailing stereotypes of blacks as criminals. The concept of racial formation illuminates the inequities present in the criminal justice system in regards to the severe criminalization of African Americans. Racial formation is “a system of racial categories and ideologies” that engenders a racial hierarchy built upon dominant ideologies and legitimated by social institutions (List of Terms, 2). The two components of …show more content…
The issue of mass incarceration calls attention to the historical master narratives about race and criminality that have tremendously impacted the rates of incarceration for drug crimes. The master narrative of a “colorblind society” presented in Michelle DuVernay’s The New Jim Crow indicates that there cannot be racial bias in the criminal justice system because America lives in an age of “colorblindness.” However, statistical data of incarceration rates for different racial groups complicates the equity and fairness of the policies instituted by criminal justice …show more content…
In the drug war, the enemy is racially defined. Because the media was saturated with images of black drug crime, this left the public with little doubt about who the enemy was in the War on Drugs. The governmental data presented in The New Jim Crow complicates the notion of blacks as criminals, revealing that whites were the most likely of any racial or ethnic group to be guilty of illegal drug possession and sales (Alexander 79). Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers in the U.S. are white, an extremely high percentage of those imprisoned for drug offenses are African American. The statistical evidence also challenges the ideology of “colorblindness” by exhibiting the racial bias against blacks when law officials convict criminals for drug offenses. If whites comprise the vast majority of drug users and dealers, then why are African Americans being incarcerated at grossly disproportionate rates? These racial disparities in the criminal justice system raise the question about the legitimacy of law enforcement in regards to flaws in its practices and policies of criminalization. The criminalization of African Americans can be analyzed by the concept of racial formation in which the representation of blacks as criminals and the structural institution of mass incarceration both work together to perpetuate the stereotype
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